IAN HALL |

This week Ashton Carter, US Defence Secretary, visited India, heading first to Goa, the home state of his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar, and then to New Delhi. He was treated to a tour of India’s aircraft carrier, the Russian-built INS Vikramaditya, and conducted an Indian delegation around the US Navy command ship Blue Ridge, normally based in Japan.

Carter’s trip comes at an intriguing moment for US-India relations, especially in the areas of defence and security. Having been estranged for much of the Cold War and the first decade of the post-Cold War era, the US and India came together during the George W. Bush administration to sign a landmark ten-year defence cooperation agreement, as well as a deal that gave India access to civilian nuclear technology, both in 2005. Thereafter, however, there were high hopes in the US that a closer partnership and a series of major arms deals would follow. They were only partially realised. As Barack Obama struggled to ‘pivot’ American attention to the Asia-Pacific and as doubts grew in New Delhi, under Manmohan Singh’s Congress Party-led government, about closer ties with the US, the relationship drifted. India rejected American bids to supply major weapons systems, not least a new medium multi-role combat aircraft, as New Delhi returned to established relationships with Russian and French firms.

Some forward momentum was restored to the US-India defence relationship with the election victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition in May 2014. The new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, made a state visit to Washington in September, and issued an unprecedented invitation to the American President to attend India’s Republic Day celebrations in January 2015. During the visit, the two sides agreed to a Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions and, perhaps more importantly, renewed their defence cooperation agreement for another decade, apparently against the wishes of some in New Delhi, who wanted to see it lapse.

Since then, however, progress in strengthening defence ties has been slow. Partly, this is due simply to problems within India’s defence bureaucracy, which has held up important procurement deals for new systems, some of which are slated to come from the US. But misaligned expectations and divergent interests continue to shape the relationship.

While India is eager for transfers of defence technology, the US imposes controls on such transfers, and New Delhi finds these irksome. Modi’s flagship economic policy of ‘Make in India’ has introduced a new dynamic into the relationship, with New Delhi committed to prioritise those defence projects that involve manufacturing new systems in India, rather than those that involve purchasing them from foreign factories. While ‘Making in India’ is not impossible for US defence firms, they lag behind their Russian counterparts in their experience of such collaboration with Indian partners. And lingering suspicions continue to surface in India about various defence agreements the US would like to see signed, including those that would permit the resupply of American naval vessels in Indian ports, and vice versa. While the US sees these logistics, communication and navigation deals as relatively innocuous, some Indian commentators see them as steps too far, and fear entanglement.

The US has worked hard to try to overcome these differences. During his first stint at the Pentagon, Ashton Carter, then Deputy Secretary, forged the US-India Defence Technology and Trade Initiative, intended to provide a framework for negotiations to overcome differences in some of these areas. This Initiative has led to significant collaborations in various areas, including laser and drone technologies. If bigger, mooted deals for American M-177 howitzers for the Indian army, technology for Indian aircraft carriers, and perhaps even Boeing F-18 Super Hornets for the airforce are eventually realized, it will be partly as a result of patient American efforts to convince India’s defence bureaucracy to set aside its doubts about closer ties to the US. It is telling, however, that Carter’s visit this week produced only an ‘in principle’ deal on military logistics and a new maritime security dialogue, and not a great deal more. The US-India defence relationship is still moving forward, but only inch by inch.

Article by Griffith Asia Institute and Centre for Governance and Public Policy Professor, Ian Hall.